It is not limited to polarized cap, the limitation is that you need to define the positive pin/supply pair, for polarized capacitors and IC pins this is fixed. In your case you're using a device with identical swappable pins - therefore you need to define the positive/negative pairs on a per instance basis or you need always connect the symbols using the same polarity.

Yes, I understand that and thats what I thought, too. We can treat unpolarized components like polarized and every designer must take care to not use a ceramic capacitor or resistor the wrong way.

I hope you can help me with two additional questions on this:

drc_voltage has an unusal definition with two values (minimum voltage and maximum voltage) in one property separated by semicolon (e.g. 50mV;6.3V)

How do you think this property can be defined and filled in the PDB? We already have a property "Voltage" that is for the maximum voltage (6.3V in the example). And there is a property "Vmin" for the minimum voltage.

Should we create a script that puts together the DRC voltage "50mV;6.3V"? Is it possible to just use the property "Voltage" wihout the minimum value and without the semicolon?

Why is the minimum voltage in all your examples (help text, guidelines, video) always "50mV"? What happens if I enter "0V"? Will this work?

I do not understand completely, why the DRC has nothing to do with PDB or DxDatabook. Maybe I still have a wrong notion what the electrical DRCs should do.

My opinion: You have a polarized cap with a maximum operating voltage of 6.3V and it is erronously connected to +12V in the schematic. So the DRC should flag this as error.

But the DRC can only know about the 6.3V when the value is annotated at the symbol. And this information comes from the PDB or DxDatabook,

Do you think the designer should provide instance data for every cap used in the schematic? What is the way a designer should work with the Verify tool? The help files mention a single maximum voltage for the whole board. But I cannot figure out for what this is for?

The settings for DRC 204 (and Verify in general) are totally independent of the part data as you can see from the configuration files you need to modify or that get modified via the UI. The only properties that appear on the symbol in this case are the DRC Positive and DRC Negative pin identifiers, all other values are entered into the Verify.ini or VerifyDefaults.ini files and applied globally.

You may wish for a more integrated and granular solution but this is how the tool functions at present and is part of our legacy with the product.

I thought that this maps to a property "DRC voltage" that can be annotated to a symbol.

We have boards with many different voltages at once (+110V, +12V, +5V, +3.3V, etc) and therefore many different caps. I still cannot believe the only thing I can do is to define a board maximum voltage?

So how should the DRC-204 should work practically? What use case do you had in mind during requirements specification of drc-204?

Martin,Many of these checks are carried over from the legacy product from 2005 and earlier and were developed for specific user's use cases. We haven't yet seriously reviewed the functionality provided and have had little feedback in this area in a long while. If you consider that there should be a better solution within the product then you should review any currently logged enhancements on Ideas and vote for them, or submit new Ideas regarding the functionality you would like to see.

Being a circuit designer for decades now, I cannot get rid of the feeling that there is no _real_ progress in the way doing computer added electrical circuit design. There are so many possibilities, so many ideas to move on. But instead we are all stumbling over the same things again and again.

There are so many essentially good features but so many stop half the way. So here is my sincere list for xDx Designer:

- The multi net connection only works with pins and not with nets and busses

- There is an archiver that does not reveals how to restore an archive.

- There is a good iCDB Project Backup tool that cannot be opened from the DxDesigner tools menu (same thing with PCB Browser)

- There is a my parts (favorites) pane that does not work with DxDatabook parts (same with recently used)

- The bad performance of the hierarchical verification make it unusable

- The variant manager has some bizarre behavior when clicking on cells. It seems like a prototyped application.

- Opening the search/replace pane only focusses the cursor in the "find what" field the first time opening it. Never again.

- Pressing CTRL-H for replace does not open the replace pane but the find pane

- All hotkeys (like "n" for draw a net) only work for sheets that are already opened. For newly opened sheets you have to click somewhere in the background to make the hotkeys work.

- The pop functionality to go one step up the hierarchy does not work correctly. In reality it simply opens the last opened sheet. When you are jumping to a page with the search pane, you go back to the last opened sheet, which is not "going up the hierarchy".

- You cannot rotate clockwise and the position of your text properties, after rotating a part, are never as you want them.

- It is still a hassle with metric and imperial system although all distances should be computer internal unit-free values. The question about inch or mm should only interest the printer and not the librarian.

For electrical circuit design, the computer is still used like a better sheet of paper with advanced copy/paste functionality.

I miss so many functions that have to do with numbers and data and electrical engineering. You at Mentor, you have it all, the netlist, the connection to the parts library, the customers parts database through DxDatabook, the layout. You have all this data.

How about:

Calculating the voltage, current and power of a resistor dividers interactively

Calculating of failure rates based on the real mission profile of the components (you know them, not the failure rate excel sheet)

Show the designers what components they are currently using in the design. Let them easily minimize different components count.

Tell the designer which components they used the most in the recent time. Warn them about e.g. two different 100nF caps (e.g. one with 6.3V one with 16V)

Do you see Mentor adding a relationship between the DRC settings and properties found in Databook in the future (I'm guessing the PCB properties would be more difficult to implement)? I have been spending a lot of time with the Verify in the past month and I have seen it find errors that were missed that caused issues in the design. However, there are some tests that could have a lot of potential (DRC 204 that Martin brings up is a good example and DRC 205 is another) if it had more access to the properties (i.e. voltage, tolerances, etc). My goal and I'm sure it is the goal of everyone is to identify and fix errors before the design gets out the door.

We are always reviewing the functionality of the product and this is one area that is on our to-do list, but as yet we have not planned nor scheduled any time to analyse the requirements and enhancements for this aspect of the product.